Into the Light
can be viewed as a pathway with blocked distractions by those unfamiliar with
the Chinese character of light, bright, clear, evident.
This somber ideogram
Gloom,
derived from the Chinese, is associated with sadness, grief, worry, and pity.
The diptych
Form / Emptiness
are derived ideograms referring to the Buddhist Heart Sutra (the core of the
large philosophical Prajaparamita treatise), which states "form is emptiness,
emptiness is form." It points toward process metaphysics, behavioral attributes,
quantum fundamentals and observational dependency, concluding that existence is
not based on nouns or stuff but on gerunds, verbal actions that serve as nouns,
and are mutually dependent.
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In English, the first character is translated to "form," but Chinese has several
characters that are synonyms pertaining to form. The sutra ideogram itself,
found in Korea and Japan as well, variously means, depending on context (usually
specified by a follow-up ideogram), appearance, or hue, or substance, or the
material world; however, artistically, aesthetically it is inferior to the one
substituted for this work, which means appearance, shape, and form by structure
or conceptual category. A third ideogram synonym might have worked in the sutra,
as it refers to domain, territory, boundary, or indeed the world itself,
everything in perceptive existence.
[The painting Form
is self-referential via brush strokes. The form of the Form ideogram has common
vertical brushing while the green background space is irregular, turbulent,
chaotic.]
The second stylized Chinese character in the sutra is typically translated as
emptiness or void or space or hole. These meanings imply duality in being absent
with respect to something. Another way to translate it, particularly for this
sutra (which presents paradox), is "no-thingness."
The background of this
painting Emptiness
suggests a rainbow or prismatic color spectrum. A rainbow from ancient times has
been a symbol of a non-thing thing. A rainbow is not a substance, but an
untouchable appearance dependent on the angle of observation [40-42°] with water
droplets serving as a prism that splits composite white light into the spread of
component hues. We nonetheless name that form and can describe it, hence
becoming perceptively real, but it does not exist alone.
In Daoism, Lao Tzu's treatise begins with "the Dao that can be named is not
Dao." In the Bible, the first act Adam assigned himself was to name the beasts
in the field and birds in the air, everything in the world, hence causing
separation and differentiation. In the quantum world, the packet of energy that
comes out of the void, or itself, can act as a particle that individually and
collectively behaves as a wave depending on observational/detectional design. In
the Hindu Upanishads, the expression is neti, neti, not this, not that. In the
common world, we concretize the metaphor.
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Quartet of Ideograms:
After a creative hiatus of 6 months during which the new book Resonance was
published, comes a return to Chinese ideograms in a different stylistic
exploration. Chosen for their spatial arrangement of strokes and spaces, not for
meaning, four ideograms serendipitously could be arranged, with poetic license,
to an interesting sentence.
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